After going through countless tutorials without ever realy trying ( stupid... ) I decided to get my feet wet with an atlas style map. Itīs an up to date unnamed world, the coastline existed like forever and was first created by afriend of mine with no scale and no RPG in mind. I tweaked it and gave mountains to it. I tried to mage up the rivers out of an DEM finetuned in Wilbur but it didnt worked out like I thought. after a few hours I just decided to go on instead of stagnating endlessly. So I present...my first worldmap. Tear it apart ;)

Aval Penworth

10-25-2010, 08:24 PM

So far I really like what you have done. It has a fairly authentic satelite feel.

If you are looking for CC, I do notice that there are some rivers making very sharp turns, and some very straight stretches of coast.

Troedel

10-26-2010, 03:16 AM

I started out with using clods and difference clouds to produce a heightmap and rendered it. It looked nice but there where no good lookingriver beds around. So I gave Wilbur a shot and applied the incise flow and tweaked the elevation a bit. But I couldnīt stamp out all the artifacts left by the cloud operation.Perhaps that is the reason for the river problem. Iīve got to give this a second try on a much smaller scale. The coast will be watched for a second approach. For now Iīll keep going.

tilt

10-26-2010, 05:26 AM

nice start... the colors are perhaps a little strong, and I'd move the scale to a corner, but great start. Way to many rivers to check, but it looks like you've got the flow down, didn't find any violations in cursory scanning :)

Lathorien

10-26-2010, 11:58 AM

Try this, colour the water black, and the land 50% grey, then use the Burn/Dodge tool to lighten strips, draw a white ridge with ridges comming out. This will build you a black-white heightscale to use in wilbur, but instead of random clouds you get moutain ridges where you want them. Dont worry about detail, just need to rough it in. After Percipitation, Incise Flow (blur 1, 2 if massive map), Incise Flow (blur 1), Incise Flow (blur 0 is smaller map), then percipitation again twice. (thats my wilbur standard) Wilbur will do alot of work/detail. After i have the wilbured relief, i render it with out rivers (like you did) path some black rivers in the right place (following the contures in your relief), then slap that black river down on your unrendered relief. Once all the rivers are black and on the relief layer, rerender your new relief layer. This will cut channels for the rivers.

Troedel

10-26-2010, 12:34 PM

@Lathorien

Looked at your maps and will give it a try, as above mentioned on a smaller scale than my map. I made coffe inbetween steps. Lots of coffe. :) THX for the advice.

Steel General

10-26-2010, 12:55 PM

Looks like a good start...

hohum

10-26-2010, 05:20 PM

Honestly I think that you did a really good job, it all looks relatively believable. I did not look too closely. As far as the colors go, it looks like you exported the color output from wilbur into gimp. Try exporting a grayscale heightmap from wilbur and coloring/bumpmapping to taste ala Torq's tutorial.

Troedel

10-26-2010, 05:46 PM

Actualy I copied the colors used in the wilbur shader to the texture for the greyscale hightmap. Itīs not an exported colored picture, I just got used to the colors starring at them for what felt like hours. Colours have been changed. Colorintensity was taken out but the change isnīt great enough right now to justify a new update on the map. I changed the ocean too because I thought the outer shine was to strong and the border to the deep see too aprupt ( spelling? ) Is there a tuturial around how to make a broken threefold coastline around ( the rings around the islands but with breaks in it )? Iīll try to do some more work tomorrow, until then thanks for the comments.

tilt

10-26-2010, 05:53 PM

there probably is a tut - but a quick way would be select landmasses (or ocean and invert) - expand selection by x-pixes - new layer - stroke ... expand again etc :)

Lathorien

10-26-2010, 08:39 PM

Actualy I copied the colors used in the wilbur shader to the texture for the greyscale hightmap. Itīs not an exported colored picture, I just got used to the colors starring at them for what felt like hours. Colours have been changed. Colorintensity was taken out but the change isnīt great enough right now to justify a new update on the map. I changed the ocean too because I thought the outer shine was to strong and the border to the deep see too aprupt ( spelling? ) Is there a tuturial around how to make a broken threefold coastline around ( the rings around the islands but with breaks in it )? Iīll try to do some more work tomorrow, until then thanks for the comments.

i use a gradient ala Ascension (like white, brown green) for a boreal area (or white, brown, dark green, light green, tan, and then revese for a global) but taking the colour right from Wilbur is good to, gives it that proffesional modern look. I like it, and as they said it is a very good map as it is, on thing you got better than me is the low land areas, i get more intence hills which is cool, but for fantasy maps where used to a lot "flat" space and your looks perfectly in the middle.

Good to see another good GIMP mapper!

http://lathorien.deviantart.com/#/d30lbjx
here is a newer example than the ones here, it shows the rivers cut in. (still improving the rivers)

i will also upload the pictures of the rough grayscale i made in 5 min by hand, and then what it looked like when it came out of wilbur to deviant art too ( i cant stand uploading and attaching files here anymore) :P

Troedel

10-27-2010, 05:26 PM

First shot at text, color adjustment, and a quick compass rose, nothing fancy just to get a feel with paths. Iīll look for a nice border, too.

Steel General

10-28-2010, 08:40 AM

Looks nice, I think I'd shorten the 'distance' of the drop shadows on the compass rose and text though.

tilt

10-28-2010, 09:28 AM

I agree, pull it in closer - looking really good :)

thomryng

10-28-2010, 01:19 PM

The terrain is just beautiful!

In addition to the drop shadow issue mentioned by Steel General and tilt, I'd take another look at the continental shelf. In some places the "glow" has the effect of making the nearby landmass look like it's levitating over the water, particularly in the south where the land is a sandier colour.

Just my two cents.

Troedel

10-28-2010, 01:43 PM

Iīll fix the dropshadow issue and will tweak the compass itself a little bit. The font has got to be a little rougher, itīs too "nice". For the levetating thing you are right thomryng. Iīll try to darken the coastareas a bit to make a connection to the water, hope that solves it. THX for the advice, wouldnīt have seen it.

Troedel

10-31-2010, 07:29 PM

I added a nice border ( as nice as it gets right now, itīs harder than it looks ;) ) changed the compass to a less intesive expirience and forgot the dropshadow. Itīs to late now to fix that. But it evolves.

Redrobes

10-31-2010, 08:21 PM

The terrain looks great and very realistic. Theres a lack of any lakes or water in the lines showing where the rivers would run. Border looks great. No problem. Only thing I can see is that you might well have intended to write see but it might have been sea.

geamon

11-01-2010, 04:03 PM

The open ocean water looks very pixelated with the gradients symbolizing the depth. You can easily apply a gaussian blur to this layer(s) and smooth it out and make it more uniform.

Troedel

11-01-2010, 07:20 PM

So hereīs another nightly build. I could not see the pixelation mentioned, perhaps it has got to do with jpg compression. Names are hard to come by and I read the pdf about placing names on maps ( itīs somewhere around here on the forum.. ) The neatlines have been tweaked a little bit, they are not true to the pixel but it will do I think. Tomorrow I will start to design the map symbols. The red in the scale bar was chosen as a contrast to the blues and greens of the map, I think I will do the symbols in a dark red too.
I looked at a satelite image of earth tonight and noticed that only the absolute biggest rivers and lakes show up in a kind of blue at a given distance. Iīve decided against going down that road as the river locations are clearly to identify. So I hope you have fun with this map. Iīm looking forward to suggestions.

tilt

11-02-2010, 06:42 AM

looks really good now, I think the red is a little strong - but thats my personal opionion. I think some of your names could benefit from a slight curve :) ... and have some rep for all your hard work, he said swinging his +7 mace of nice repping :)

Troedel

11-02-2010, 06:29 PM

So, Iīm thinking final touches. Iīve named the big city, added a few curves to the oceanic names and made a city symbol. Iīve got to say it was hard work up to this point and very much experimenting with the various settings. So here is the thing for final comments till I add this to my final maps folder ( the first one ;) ). Iīm still absolutley amazed by this community, Iīll try to live up to this. Itīs a great time.

tilt

11-02-2010, 06:37 PM

hmmmm... attachment is just a blank page?

Troedel

11-02-2010, 06:45 PM

It seems to work for me... have you tried again? Itīs showing up in my browser...wich means nothing.